CPU Reviews & Articles

SiSoft SANDRA 2009 Bandwidth Performance

SiSoft SANDRA 2009 is a very popular system benchmark, and each revision sticks to its roots and supplies a wide range of individual benchmarks and system utilities. These tests include processor, system, network, and hard drive benchmarks, along with many other performance metrics. The memory bandwidth test is the most popular section of the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark suite, and it highlights the potential performance levels of the CPU-memory subsystem. As the Integer and FPU memory bandwidth scores are quite similar, we are only including the first one in our benchmark testing.

The memory bandwidth test in SANDRA 2009 is the first entirely memory-specific benchmark so far, and it will be interesting to see how the revamped AM3 Phenom II core responds. So far it looks favorable, as the Phenom II X4 810 outperforms the X4 940, and the Phenom II X3 720 posts the highest non-Core i7 score in the entire chart.

The SiSoft SANDRA 2009 Cache & Memory benchmark goes well beyond memory performance, and measures the bandwidth of the combined processor cache and memory subsystem. This test can show off the architectural advantages of each processor, as well as the benefits of larger and faster L1/L2 data caches, and help give us an overall view of how the processor and memory match up in high-speed data transfers.

This test highlights one of the limitations of the smaller L3 cache size in the Phenom II X4 810, as it falls back of the Phenom II X4 920. The triple-core Phenom II X3 720 finds itself at the bottom of the chart, ahead of only the Core 2 Duo E7300.

SiSoft SANDRA 2009 incorporates a multi-core benchmark that tests the inter-core bandwidth, processor affinity and speed of today's top-end CPUs. This measures the efficiency of the inter-connect bandwidth, and determines overall bandwidth available between processors.

Through multiple iterations of the SiSoft SANDRA benchmark, AMD Phenom-based processors have had a serious problem with this test, and although the results have jumped slightly for the Phenom II X4 810, the Intel processors remain well ahead.